The First Video Game?

Before 'Pong,' There Was 'Tennis for Two'

Before the era of electronic ping pong, hungry yellow dots, plumbers,
mushrooms, and fire-flowers, people waited in line to play video games
at roller-skating rinks, arcades, and other hangouts. More than fifty
years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in
line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play “Tennis for Two,” an
electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern
video game.

Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of
the Lab’s annual visitors’ days. Two people played the electronic tennis
game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and
used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game’s creator, William
Higinbotham, was a nuclear physicist lobbied for nuclear
nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American
Scientists.

Tennis Anyone?

Higinbotham realized how static and non-interactive most science
exhibits were at that time. As head of Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation
Division, he would change that. While reflecting on his creation,
Higinbotham wrote, “it might liven up the place to have a game that
people could play, and which would convey the message that our
scientific endeavors have relevance for society."

Visitors playing Tennis for Two saw a two-dimensional, side view of a
tennis court on the oscilloscope screen, which used a cathode-ray tube
similar to a black and white television tube. The ball, a brightly lit,
moving dot, left trails as it bounced to alternating sides of the net.
Players served and volleyed using controllers with buttons and rotating
dials to control the angle of an invisible tennis racquet’s swing.

Hundreds of visitors lined up for a chance
to play the electronic tennis game. And Higinbotham could not have
dreamed that his game would be a forerunner to an entire industry that
less than fifty years later, would account for $9.5 billion in sales in
2006 and 2007 in the U.S. alone, according to a report published by the
Electronic Software Association.

In 1982, Creative Computing magazine picked up on the idea that
Tennis for Two might be the first video game ever and it published a
story on the game in that year’s October issue. It credited Higinbotham
as the inventor of the video game — until they heard from someone who
could document an earlier game. The same story was reprinted in the
Spring 1983 issue of Video and Arcade Games, a sister magazine to
Creative Computing.

127

First Video Game?

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play Tennis for Two, an electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern video game. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game's creator, William Higinbotham, was a physicist who lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American Scientists.

How Did He Do It?

The “brain” of Tennis for Two was a small analog computer. The
computer's instruction book described how to generate various curves on
the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and
relays. Among the examples given in the book were the trajectories of a
bullet, missile, and bouncing ball, all of which were subject to gravity
and wind resistance. While reading the instruction book, the bouncing
ball reminded Higinbotham of a tennis game and the idea of Tennis for
Two was born.

William Higinbotham

One of the original electrical schematics for Tennis for Two.

Higinbotham used four of the computer’s operational amplifiers to
generate the ball’s motion while the computer’s remaining six amplifiers
sensed when the ball hit the ground or net and switched controls to the
person in whose court the ball was located. In order to generate the
court, net, and ball on screen, it was necessary to time-share these
functions.

“The real innovation in this game is the use of those ‘new-fangled’
germanium transistors that were just becoming commercially available in
the late 1950s,” said Peter Takacs of Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation
Division, who is currently working to rebuild a playable Tennis for Two.
“Higinbotham used the transistors to build a fast-switching circuit that
would take the three outputs from the computer and display them
alternately on the oscilloscope screen at a ‘blazing’ fast speed of 36
Hertz. At that display rate, the eye sees the ball, the net, and the
court as one image, rather than as three separate images.”

In 1958, when Tennis for Two was first introduced, the oscilloscope
display was only five inches in diameter. In 1959, the game was
improved. A larger screen between 10 and 17 inches in diameter was used
and players could select variations of tennis on the moon, with low
gravity, or on Jupiter, with high gravity.

A later incarnation of Tennis For Two from 1961.

Higinbotham, the Person for the Job

Considering Higinbotham’s background, Tennis for Two was a natural
outgrowth of his schooling and work experience. During his senior year
at Williams College, he used an oscilloscope to produce a system to
display the audio modulation of a radio station's high frequency radio
output. As a graduate student in Cornell's physics department, he worked
as a general-purpose technician, learning the new and rapidly developing
field of electronics.

In 1940, Higinbotham joined the staff of the MIT Radiation Laboratory
and worked on cathode-ray tube displays for airborne, ship-borne, and
land-based radars. This involved designing a way to display radio waves
that echoed or bounced back off distant targets. Later, Higinbotham
worked on the Eagle radar display system, which showed the radar returns
of ground targets as seen from a high-flying B-28 airplane. The picture
of the target area stood still on the display, in spite of the yaw,
pitch, or roll of the aircraft while maneuvering toward the target. This
work led to patents for circuits that used operational amplifiers like
those in the analog computer used for the tennis game.

David Potter, who was greatly inspired by Higinbotham and worked with
him at the time Tennis for Two was designed and built, commented on
Higinbotham’s designs, stating, “Higinbotham’s circuits were rock solid.
I found his work to be so beautiful, so simple. For someone involved in
electronics, these really were something to behold.”

All in all, when Higinbotham designed Tennis for Two, he incorporated
much of what he had done before. As he recalled, it took about two hours
to lay out the design and a couple of days to fill it in with components
on hand. Brookhaven Lab technician Bob Dvorak put it together in about
three weeks, and the two of them took a day or two to debug it. The Lab
still has official blueprints dated 1958.

Was 'Tennis for Two' the First?

Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two was actually preceded by several other
inventions — one in the late 1940s and two in the early 1950s. But it
would not be fair or correct to award the title of “the first video
game” to any one of these specific inventions.

In 1948, ten years before Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, Thomas T.
Goldsmith Jr. and Estle R. Mann patented the “Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement
Device,” making this currently the earliest-documented video game
predecessor. The amusement device, however, required players to overlay
pictures or illustrations of targets such as airplanes in front of the
screen, dovetailing the game’s action. This was unlike Higinbotham’s
Tennis for Two, which entirely displayed the game’s visuals on the
screen.

Another video game-like device, the Nimrod computer, was built by
Ferranti International and first displayed at the Festival of Britain’s
Exhibition of Science in 1951. Although the computer was built to play
the century-old game of logic and strategy called “Nim,” the electronic
version of the game was specifically designed to demonstrate the
processing power of the new computing device. This was in contrast with
Tennis for Two, which was designed to be played for fun. In addition,
the Nimrod computer did not use a cathode-ray tube display with elements
that appeared to “move” on screen like Tennis for Two. Instead, it used
a set of fixed lights that turned on and off and a legend to describe
what was happening throughout the demonstration.

Then, in 1952, A.S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge created an
electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe, which he titled “OXO” (or Noughts and
Crosses). This single-player “game” was designed for academic purposes —
Douglas used the electronic OXO on the famous Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator, or EDSAC, to study the “Interactions Between Human
and Computer.” Like electronic Nim, electronic OXO was not designed to
be entertaining.

Some argue that Tennis for Two or any one of the earlier predecessors
to the modern video game cannot be titled the first “video” game because
not one of them displayed a “video” signal. The term “video” implies
that electronic signals are converted to images on a screen using a
raster pattern, a series of horizontal lines composed of individual
pixels. Although older oscilloscopes, televisions, and computer screens
all used cathode-ray tubes, oscilloscopes visually display changes in
electrical voltage; they do not use the raster process. While
Higinbotham’s system did not create a video signal, he had created a
unique way to alternate among the computer’s outputs with the transistor
switching circuit, creating the image of a tennis court and allowing
players to control a movable ball seen on a screen, just like a modern
video game.

A recreation of the original Tennis For Two constructed for the 50th
anniversary of the game's first appearance.

Schematics and Deposition

Years after Higinbotham built Tennis for Two, the game received
notoriety in the legal system. In the mid-1970s, Higinbotham's game
was "discovered" and brought into legal battle against the first
video game patent, held by Magnavox. Higinbotham made the following
deposition and notes during that time period. Also provided here are
the original game's schematics.

Wrapping Up the Game

In retrospect, Higinbotham agreed he should have applied for a
patent. But if he had, the patent would have belonged to the federal
government, and no riches would have come his way, anyway. According to
Higinbotham, the reason he did not apply was that at the time, the game
did not seem to be any more novel than the bouncing ball circuit in the
instruction book.

Higinbotham, who died in 1994, wished to be known for his work on
radar displays and his efforts to slow the nuclear arms race. Little did
he know that Tennis for Two, the game he had created for Brookhaven
Lab’s open house in 1958 to entertain visitors and convey the relevance
of scientific endeavors for society, would lead to Pong, Pac-Man, Mario,
new video game systems and new video games, magazines, and Congressional
debates. He might have guessed that it would lead to fun.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical,
biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security.
Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry
and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven
Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State
University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory
facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit applied science and technology organization.